an update to automake-1.11?

Sam Varshavchik mrsam at courier-mta.com
Wed Jul 8 22:12:46 UTC 2009


Kevin Kofler writes:

> What he was talking about is that rediffing patches, i.e. making patches 
> apply to a new upstream version (that's what "rediffing" means for us Fedora 
> packagers), is more likely to break for configure.ac than for configure.

And that's exactly what I said. Thank you for agreeing with me, that fixing 
configure is less likely to cause problems in the long run.

>> Which happens far less often than routine changes to configure.ac, as the
>> package natural evolves over time. autoconf changes happens maybe once
>> every other year or so. Most configure script change far more often than
>> once every other year.
> 
> I don't know what upstreams you worked with. For the projects I worked on 
> with Romain Liévin, he generally ran autoreconf with what was current on 
> Debian unstable or testing that day and me with what was current on Fedora 
> (stable updates) that day. The stuff would even ping-pong between the Debian

Well, I don't know what those projects were, but here's a better known 
example. I just downloaded all available versions of the 2.4 branch of 
openldap, and greped their configure script. The results are:

openldap-2.4.6/configure:# Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.59.
openldap-2.4.7/configure:# Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.59.
openldap-2.4.8/configure:# Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.59.
openldap-2.4.9/configure:# Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.59.
openldap-2.4.10/configure:# Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.59.
openldap-2.4.11/configure:# Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.59.
openldap-2.4.12/configure:# Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.59.
openldap-2.4.13/configure:# Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.59.
openldap-2.4.14/configure:# Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.61.
openldap-2.4.15/configure:# Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.61.
openldap-2.4.16/configure:# Generated by GNU Autoconf 2.61.

Now, let's grep configure.in:

openldap-2.4.6/configure.in:dnl $OpenLDAP: pkg/ldap/configure.in,v 1.631.2.7 
2007/10/16 23:43:09 quanah Exp $
openldap-2.4.7/configure.in:dnl $OpenLDAP: pkg/ldap/configure.in,v 1.631.2.7 
2007/10/16 23:43:09 quanah Exp $
openldap-2.4.8/configure.in:dnl $OpenLDAP: pkg/ldap/configure.in,v 1.631.2.9 
2008/02/11 23:26:37 kurt Exp $
openldap-2.4.9/configure.in:dnl $OpenLDAP: pkg/ldap/configure.in,v 1.631.2.9 
2008/02/11 23:26:37 kurt Exp $
openldap-2.4.10/configure.in:dnl $OpenLDAP: pkg/ldap/configure.in,v 
1.631.2.9 2008/02/11 23:26:37 kurt Exp $
openldap-2.4.11/configure.in:dnl $OpenLDAP: pkg/ldap/configure.in,v 
1.631.2.9 2008/02/11 23:26:37 kurt Exp $
openldap-2.4.12/configure.in:dnl $OpenLDAP: pkg/ldap/configure.in,v 
1.631.2.14 2008/09/17 22:54:33 quanah Exp $
openldap-2.4.13/configure.in:dnl $OpenLDAP: pkg/ldap/configure.in,v 
1.631.2.17 2008/11/21 01:26:24 quanah Exp $
openldap-2.4.14/configure.in:dnl $OpenLDAP: pkg/ldap/configure.in,v 
1.631.2.22 2009/01/26 21:54:23 quanah Exp $
openldap-2.4.15/configure.in:dnl $OpenLDAP: pkg/ldap/configure.in,v 
1.631.2.22 2009/01/26 21:54:23 quanah Exp $
openldap-2.4.16/configure.in:dnl $OpenLDAP: pkg/ldap/configure.in,v 
1.631.2.22 2009/01/26 21:54:23 quanah Exp $

Over a span of nearly two years, openldap updated their autotools exactly 
once, while configure.in changed six times (with several additional 
intervening changes in-between consecutive releases).

Which busy project would you like to repeat this experiment with?

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